Syrian Civil War

It is fitting that the day before President Barack Obama gives his grand West Point address defending the wisdom and prudence of his foreign policy, his government should be urging Americans to evacuate Libya. Libya, of course, was once the model Obama intervention — the exquisitely calibrated military engagement wrapped in the rhetorical extravagance of a nationally televised address proclaiming his newest foreign policy doctrine (they change to fit the latest ad hoc decision): the responsibility to protect. You don't hear R2P bandied about much anymore. Not with more than 50,000 civilians having been slaughtered in Syria's civil war, unprotected in any way by the United...

Related "Syrian Civil War" Articles

It is fitting that the day before President Barack Obama gives his grand West Point address defending the wisdom and prudence of his foreign policy, his government should be urging Americans to evacuate Libya.
Libya, of course, was once the model Obama...

The Obama administration, stung by reversals in Ukraine and Syria, appears to have decided to expand its covert program of training and assistance for the Syrian opposition, deepening U.S. involvement in that brutal and stalemated civil war.
The White...

Early this month, Secretary of State John Kerry applied a misguided sense of history to today's American foreign policy. In an attempt to galvanize international support for military intervention in Syria for President Bashar al-Assad's violation of...

The president of the United States takes to the airwaves to urgently persuade the nation to pause before doing something it has no desire to do in the first place.
Strange. And it gets stranger still. That "strike Syria, maybe" speech begins...

President Obama is right to pursue a dual track — one toward a peaceful resolution of the Syrian chemical weapons crisis, the other a possible wielding of the U.S. military hammer — in response to Syria's deadly gassing of its own civilian population.
...

Sen. Bob Corker: "What is it you're seeking?"
Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: "I can't answer that, what we're seeking."
— Senate hearing on the use of force in Syria, Sept. 3.
We have a problem. The...

Undoubtedly you've heard that American credibility is on the line, thanks to President Barack Obama's vacillation on what to do about Syria.
To bomb or not to bomb, that is always the question.
Obama, indeed, seems to be stricken with indecision. Two...

The war in Syria, started by locals, is now a regional conflict, the meeting ground of two warring blocs. On one side, the radical Shiite bloc led by Iran, which overflies Iraq to supply Bashar al-Assad and sends Hezbollah to fight for him. Behind them...

On Wednesday, Qusair fell to the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria. Qusair is a strategic town that connects Damascus with Assad's Alawite heartland on the Mediterranean, with its ports and Russian naval base. It's a major strategic shift. Assad's forces...

You know you're in trouble when you can't even get your walk-back story straight. Stung by the worldwide derision that met President Barack Obama's fudging and fumbling of his chemical-weapons red line in Syria, the White House leaked to The New York...

It's a measure of the relatively quiet time for Israel these days that the sharpest argument at a big national security conference here was between an ultra-Orthodox rabbi who wanted "autonomy" for his fellow believers and secular Israelis in...

Turkey and the United States have agreed on the outlines of a plan to rout the Islamic State group from a strip of Syrian territory along the Turkish border — a plan that opens the possibility of a safe haven for tens of thousands of displaced Syrians but...

The United States and Turkey are finalizing plans for a military campaign to push the Islamic State group out of a strip of Syrian territory along the Turkish border, a move that would further embroil Turkey in Syria's civil war and set up a potential...

In his first public address in a year, embattled Syrian President Bashar Assad vowed Sunday to win his country's long-running civil war while acknowledging his troops had lost territory to rebel forces and were running short on manpower. Assad's speech,...

Syrian President Bashar Assad delivered a sober assessment of the state of his forces on Sunday, acknowledging a manpower shortage and conceding troop withdrawals from some areas, but asserting that the military was not facing collapse.
The president...

In his first public address in a year, embattled Syrian President Bashar Assad vowed Sunday to win his country's long-running civil war while acknowledging his troops had lost territory to rebel forces and were running short on manpower.
Assad's...

Syria's two main political opposition groups agreed on Thursday on a unified "roadmap" for a political solution to the country's long-running civil war, representatives of the groups said. The two parties have been trying for years to reach a...

The nuclear deal with Iran was met with a profound wariness in the Arab world, where concerns are widespread that the easing of its international isolation could tip the already bloody contest for power in the region toward Shiite-led Tehran. Arab...

President Obama talks every day about defeating the Islamic State militants, but advisors say one option never surfaces for serious consideration – bringing the U.S. military in more directly to save the fledgling Iraqi security forces from their...

WASHINGTON Seated on a dais above thousands of cheering loyalists and the country's elite, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei restated a key tenet of his late predecessor and the leader of the 1979 Islamic Revolution: relentless, uncompromising...